The Glade 4.0

It takes Blizzard entirely too long to put games out.

I get the "when its ready" thing, but they've just been ridiculous lately.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Then get 10 million people to unsubscribe from WoW -- make them have to hunger for success again.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Exactly.

Cataclysm should have been released at *least* 6 months ago.

At this point, I don't even really care about it all that much.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Play Starcraft II!

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe

I am really surprised people even play WoW anymore. Especially 10 million people. The game offers absolutely nothing once you hit the cap unless you like pvp. Raiding is incredibly boring and easy and you don't advance your character at all unless there is a level cap increase. Talent trees are incredibly limiting and the storyline has gone to complete ****. WTF? 10 million people? Really? God damn you World of Warcraft! I wanted Warcraft 4!

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Yeah, I don't get the 10 million people thing either.

Certainly on my server there feels like there's only about 60 people that are on.

They really need to combine some of their servers. They have WAY too many.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I could see 10 million accounts created, easily...but 10 million active? I have a really hard time swallowing that. Especially in those months after the last content upgrade and expansion. Numbers always seem to drop sharply in that time. Especially since WotLK has the easiest raid content of any time during WoW's lifespan. People plowed through that ****. I remember it taking forever before people finally beating Molten Core, Blackwing Lair and especially AQ40 and the original Naxx(The Four Horsemen? Forget about it. God damn those **** were hard). Things just got easier and easier until you have people blowing through new instances in a single night. The only way they could slow **** down is by gating stuff behind retarded server events.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

I played an early version of SC2 at Gencon 2007 when I went...

I remember the Thor built by SCVs

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Just about any reported numbers (especially from the company itself) are always suspect IMO.

I'd love to see the actual sales numbers of the three game consoles out now.

There is still a ton of contact at lvl cap.

Base line raiding can get boring quickly, but if you engage in hard modes and the achievements, those can be a decent challenge. PVP is another option as you've mentioned, which in Cata will get even better with rated BGs.

Hard modes are just gimmicks. And Cheeves are just gimmicks as well.

ICC was all the same crap over, and over and over and over. RS was a huge disappointment. And Cata took too long to come out.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Well if you want to get technical everything in an MMO is a "gimmick".

If you think hard modes are gimmicks, then what do you think "real content" is?

Blizzard intends for hard modes to be part of raiding, and not just a gimmick, so I don't think it's really fair to treat it as such. I mean, you certainly can disagree with them on the whole concept, but if you do you're probably going to be disappointed. Unless you're extremely casual, at any rate. :p And as far as hard modes go, raids certainly aren't too easy for me or any other guild on my entire server, seeing as how we fail at HLK25. (and personally, just did Herald of the Titans myself and just last night had a wipe with ~600k hp left to go on HLK10 on our first real night of trying. alas!)

But... Cata definitely did take too long to come out all the same. Granted I don't believe Blizzard is happy with Cata coming out so late either, but at some point you have to start budgeting time better. It's not like Blizzard delays are exactly surprising anymore... could've delayed ToC (which itself kinda failed as being only half a raid) 3 months or something, at least. Would've made the balance between Ulduar and ICC a lot better, and kept ICC from being the only significant current content raid (RS was nice but it's just one boss, so it's not going to really make waves) for just shy of 1 full friggin year.

Diablo 3 I could grant some extra leeway for, though, since it's different than an MMO where too long a delay leaves players spinning their wheels on the same stuff forever. But perhaps it's just easier for me to say that cause I'm not OMG pumped for Diablo 3. :p

Hard modes are the same content... just more. And Achievements are the same content, just do it differently.

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Holy shitsnacks!

It ends up being a judgement call, really. If you drop hard modes you wind up back in Sunwellesque scenarios.

You either make a normal/hard split or you make stuff hard to begin with and nerf as things go along. The more you nerf, the wider a range of easy-hard you can make... or like ICC, you can do both and get a crazy big range of difficulty. Marrowgar normal with 30% buff compared to heroic LK without 30% covers just about everyone who raids. Brutallus covered very, very few people until the huge BC nerfs one month before WotLK, and even then there weren't a ton of guilds on my server going through him (though much of that was pre-expansion apathy I imagine).

End up with drawbacks to either method.

Perhaps one option is to hire more developers to make the hard modes more fight-changing. Mimiron is the example that's always brought up, cause it was just about perfect. It's a difficult discussion to have on either side of the argument though since there is little in the way of facts or logic to be put forth, but I'm a bit leery you can just add a bunch of devs with the only result being more content.

Unless they hire me as one of them, anyway!

I'd rather have Sunwell over WotLK "hard modes."

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

WoW forum is thataway ------>

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D3 beta possible soon. 2011 launch a possibility.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Diablo ... 12993.html



Can you imagine? Duke Nukem Forever AND Diablo 3 in the same year?!?!

We'll see...

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

Cool.

Though D3 isn't a game I'd want to beta. I'd rather play through the first time just for the story. After that, sure. It's all about multiplayer grinding.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

I imagine it will be a rather short beta for that reason. They don't have a lot of pvp balancing like they had to do in Starcraft 2(though Diablo 3 will have pvp arenas, but it isn't set up to be an e-sport like Starcraft). Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part that they won't have a long beta.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

/facepalm.

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Holy shitsnacks!

From what I've seen, I think they're very much hoping that D3 will develop an Esport status.

I think it's silly. Esports will never work when there are so many factors at play(to be honest, I'm surprised Starcraft has made it to that point with three entirely unique races to play against each other). That's why WoW arenas were dropped by the MLG.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Esports a a whole are silly.

Can we just have games that one person can play and enjoy? Deep, compelling stories and solid gameplay without grinding and endless balancing for E-Sport pvp crap?

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Holy shitsnacks!

Fixed.